$74 Trillion=Crisis

By

Thomas R. Saving

Updated March 9, 2005 12:01 a.m. ET

It has become de rigueur for opponents of Social Security reform to say that President Bush has "manufactured a crisis" so that he can introduce personal accounts into a system that is already solvent, and will be so for decades to come. As a member of the Board of Trustees of the Social Security and Medicare Trust Funds, I say it is these critics who are confecting an alternate reality.

While it is true that Social Security is currently running a surplus, Medicare is running an even bigger deficit. One way to...